The media, particularly radio and television, were, of course, important in that bygone era of the early and middle 1960s just as they are today, though not to the same extent. At that time television, which was still somewhat in its infancy and was, at least for that metaphorical fifteen minutes, all the rage. My family, like most other families of the era I knew, had one television in the house. A few of my friends and acquaintances even had one of those newfangled technological marvels in their homes, the colour television. I still vaguely recall the day that I discovered colour TV thanks to a nearby neighbour whose family had one in their home. We kids, as I recall, stared in wonder at the colour pictures emanating from the television screen thinking all the while about how wonderful our world full of technological gadgets as it was, was. Interestingly, I can't recall when our house got its first colour television though I am almost certain that it was in the late sixties since my Dad worked for a division of the Dutch corporation Philips. As with other families at the time our television was a large and incredibly heavy box like thing that sat in the centre of the aptly named TV room of our house so all could see it from the couch that sat along one side of the TV room or from the floor, which was my preferred spatial mode of television watching. It was almost like going to temple or sitting in church.
Saturday morning, in particular, was an almost magical day in my house when it came to TV watching, something which was limited on other days by parental decree and by the realities of my daily schedule. Saturday, unlike other days, including Sunday, the day when the dreaded religious oriented programme dominated the morning schedules of television stations in Dallas, Texas, was a day in which one could escape, if briefly, from the mundanity and banality of "normal" everyday life with its endless cycle of get up, eat breakfast, go to school, eat school lunch, come home from school, eat dinner, play a bit, go to bed, and get up the next morning ready to do it all over again, again. While the parents slept well into Saturday morning, an escape for them from the "normal" routines of the work week, I escaped into Saturday morning cartoons like Mighty Mouse (1955-1967), Tom and Jerry (1965-1972), Underdog (1964-1973) along with the seemingly endless reruns of Little Rascals and the Three Stooges
comedies. I watched them all with little sense of intellectual engagement. Instead I watched them because of the sense that I had that there really was nothing better to do on a Saturday morning, a feeling I suspect was common among many young people at the time. TV was, in other words, simply there.
Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Underdog, Spanky and the gang, and the Three Stooges weren't at the top of my list of favourite Saturday morning viewing fare. I preferred Looney Tunes in its various incarnations such as the Bugs Bunny Show (1960-2000), the Road Runner Show (1966-1973), and the Porky Pig Show (1967-1967). Why Looney Tunes? I suspect I was attracted and engaged by their parody and absurdity though I wouldn't have described it that way at the time. Given this, it should be easy to understand why I liked Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) and Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and why I never got into later animated TV shows like Scooby-Doo, Where are You! (1969-1970), a show which I was already too old for by the time it debuted and which I found rather eh. I don't think that even cannabis, could I have gotten hold of some at the time, would have helped me enjoy this formulaic mystery oriented television programme that now has become legendary for later generations thanks to its perceived campy organish music and its perceived stoner vibe. Shaggy in that show, of course, is an updated Maynard G. Krebs for the stoner age.
I also, of course, watched a bit of evening television now and again throughout my teen years, a bit being the operative phrase here since everyday life and my parents limiting the amount of prime time television I could watch came into play particularly on weekdays. I recall watching a bit of Batman (1966-1968), which had its fifteen minutes of fame on American television in the mid-sixties, less because I was a fan of comic book superheros and more because I became a fan of Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in the show. I watched the Dick van Dyke Show (1961-1966) in reruns and liked it immensely, finding it unexpectedly literate and sometimes brilliant. I watched and liked It Takes a Thief (1968-1970). I was briefly taken in by those hippieish characters who were a bit older than me of the The Mod Squad (1968-1973), young people who looked like I wanted to look back then but couldn't since my parents and my school had a hair length "dress" code for males. I quickly outgrew that show, however, when I managed to see through its rather transparent consensus ideology message which attempted to make us viewers identify with angsty do goodish counterculturalists now working for the good and virtuous man, and for truth, justice, apple pie, Chevrolet, and the American way.
Television, while it was a part of my teenage years, never became the be all and end all of my teenage life. I "played", when ill health didn't intervene, with friends and acquaintances from the neighbourhood. I hiked along Five Mile Creek to the north of my neighbourhood and wandered through the woods near my house off of Blue Ridge Boulevard to the south east of my home. I was what might today a fan of some things, most of them unrelated to television. I read books, something that was becoming a central part of my life at the time. I worshipped the Dallas Cowboys every Sunday. After all, I lived in a state where football was and is the state religion football. The Cowboys made me suffer. I still remember the heartbreak I suffered when the Cowboys lost to Green Bay in the Ice Bowl. Eventually, my fanish devotion to the Cowboys, a fannish devotion that was coded as normal in the Dallas of my time cooled. Cowboy worship eventually proved evanescent though I do have to admit that I sometimes, if inattentively, still pay attention to how the Cowboys are doing and what was once heartbreak has turned to oh well.
Even the Dallas Cowboys had to take a back seat to my real fanboy devotion of the era, however, the Beatles. I had been an avid fan of the Beatles since 1963 when my mum let me, after much pleading on my part, to buy me the newest Beatles album, the first Beatles album, Please Please Me (1963). Me and my friends spent hours listening to the Beatles, talking about the Beatles, who I loved though not to the point of blinding fanboy hero worship, trying to figure out what Beatles were trying to say to us, and talking about something we thought the Beatles were trying to talk to us about, the ever present war in Vietnam, which I grew to oppose and protest against. By the late 1960s the Beatles led me to other though not necessarily harder stuff particularly of progressive and pyschedelic variety. I fell in love with rock bands like King Crimson, whose In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) I heard for the first time on a contercultural FM station out of Arlington, Texas, The Moody Blues, and songs like "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", "Incence and Peppermints", and "Pictures of Matchstick Men". Compared to progressive and psychedilic music television mediocrities like Gilligan's Island (1964-1967), The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), and even Star Trek (1966-1969), which tried, at least, to be intelligent and literate in that Wagon Train (1957-1965) sort of way, never stood a chance though, I must admit that, it was sometimes pleasant to see the beautiful people of Hollywood on display on the small screen.
One could also, of course, see the beautiful people of Hollywood on the big screen. Throughout the 1960s I became more and more interested in another communications medium that is chock full of Hollywoodish beautiful people, film. My father introduced me to the films of Alfred Hitchcock in 1964 and I was both fascinated by them and came to adore them. From that devotion an interest in film scholarship developed. Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock was the first book of film criticism I ever read. Hitchcock's films were not the only ones that fascinated and intrigued me. One morning while I was home from school because of asthma I got when I was twelve, an asthma that has affected almost every aspect of my subsequent life in many and sundry ways, I saw the 1956 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four starring Edmond O'Brien. It, to use the slang of the time, blew my mind. By the time I started college after a two year hiatus in 1975 I was already a cinephile. By then I sought out the films of Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Anthony Mann, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and others, so adolescent retreads of Hollywood film serials that enthralled the gaze of teenagers, physical and mental, and who they introduced to the addictive glories of empty spectacle, were simply not appealing to me or of interest to me in any way. Hence my whoop-de-doo about Star Wars.
Comic books, which are all the rage in some quarters today and which have deeply impacted how Hollywood makes films in the post movie brats era, with their powerful men and often scantily clad women, their caricatures of All American good and All Anti-American evil, caricatures we youth were supposed to recognise, chose to be like and not like, and model ourselves after and not after, thanks to our socialisation, did not appeal to me either in my youth or today, though I must admit I did find Superman: Red Son (2003) interesting when I hit my forties. I knew of the existence of comics, of course. Some of my friends bought them along with Rat Finks, sour balls, and candy bars at the local drug store. I recall once buying a comic book issue of the Man from U.N.C.L.E., a TV show I did not watch and had no interest in watching at the time, for twelve cents thanks to peer pressure. Little did I realise at the time that tie-ins like that one between one form of American popular culture and another, would become as omnipresent and as saturated across media platforms, fast food restaurants, and breakfast cereal as they are today. I also recall buying the Three Musketeers Classic Illustrated comic book classic but quickly decided it was better to buy and read the real thing. Even baseball cards were more appealing to me than comic books. After all, baseball was the biggest sport in the US at the time and I did adore Sandy Koufax and see him as a role model in my life.
I remained more interested in music and film than in American television well into the late nineties. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. I was aware of what television could do thanks to Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974), Upstairs Downstairs (1971-1975), Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Brideshead Revisited (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Inspector Morse (1987-2000), Prime Suspect (1991-2006), Cracker (1993-1996), and a host of British television adaptations of classic novels, particularly those of the Brontes and Jane Austen, television shows that US television simply could not come close to in terms of quality. There were American TV shows I did regularly watch if somewhat fitfully throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and which I liked. I really liked, for instance, the very cinematic, dramatic, and comic The Wonder Years (1988-1993). Most of the stuff I saw on American television, however, including the talky Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) with its extensive cast, the screwball Moonlighting (1985-1989), which wore out its welcome within a year, and the weird for weirds sake Twin Peaks (1990-1991), which ran out of steam within a few months, simply weren't intellectually appealing or even stimulating to someone who had seen and who enjoyed the films of Luis Bunuel and Dusan Makavejev. It wasn't until the X-Files (1993-2018) that I began to really take notice of American television. X-Files was somewhat revelatory for me, though it too soon lost its way (by the fifth season, I would argue) thanks, in part, to the structure of American commercial television with its penchant for flogging dead horses for financial benefit rather than artistic glory. It was not until Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) that I really began to sit up and take notice of what American television and television in general might do and sometimes did do artistically, that turned me into a more avid TV watcher.
Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon, is the subject of David Lavery's book Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Avengers (London: Tauris, 2014). Lavery's book foregrounded for me how one's birth cohort matters, for while Whedon was influenced by some of the same things I was, --films and television programmes--he was impacted by them in different ways than I was and he was also impacted by things that I wasn't, such as comic books. Additionally, both of us, because of our different birth cohorts, were impacted by the different historical contexts that we lived through. My cohort, for example, was not influenced by comic book films in the same way that Whedon's was and Whedon's cohort was not as impacted by the assasination of John F. Kennedy in the ways mine was. I still have very vivid memories of arriving home from school on 22 November 1963 and seeing my grandparents and parents sitting in front of a black and white television watching news coverage of the assasination of JFK on that day.
Lavery, who is often referred to as the father of Buffy and Whedon Studies by those engaged in Buffy and Whedon Studies--the mother being fellow academic Rhonda Wilcox--has written a book that is not your typical biography of a Hollywood celebrity. It is biographical. Lavery tells us a tale of a man who came from a family of writers. His grandfather and father wrote for television while his mother was a bohemiany activist, lover of the arts, and writer, who I, for some reason, always picture as somewhat like the grandmother in Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982). Lavery follows Whedon from his school days in the US and England, where Whedon attended the elite Winchester public school, and elite Wesleyan University in Connecticut, through to his early days as a writer of Hollywood television shows like Roseanne (1998-2015), script doctor for films like Speed (1994), writer and creator of the film version of his now more famous television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Hollywood cult success as creator, writer, and director, of the television shows Buffy, Angel (1999-2004), Firefly (2002-2003), and Dollhouse (2009-2020), and finally to writer and director of a Hollywood mega blockbuster success (modern Hollywood speaks commodity aestheticism), Marvel Comics's The Avengers/Avengers Assemble (2012).
While Lavery's book fills in much of the traditional biographical details of Whedon's life up to around 2014 (before the release of his second Avengers film Avengers: The Age of Ultron in 2015), the book centres more on what Howard Gruber's theory of creativity and creative artistry and the creative life can tell us about creative personalities and auteurs like Joss Whedon. Gruber, a psychologist who specialised in the study of human creativity before his death, argued that creative people develop emotional ties to certain elements, certain phenomena, or certain problems and that their creativity becomes tied to certain forms of knowledge, certain strategies of purpose, and to specific emotions over time. Creative individuals like Whedon, Lavery drawing on Gruber contends, draw and drew on a network of enterprises, exhibit a sense of purpose or a will that perseveres over time and gives direction to their lives, and who strive to create images of great scope. Lavery thus traces the influence several things in Whedon's life. These influences included, argues Lavery, comic books like Marvel Comic's Spider-Man. Whedon's father wrote for PBS's Electric Company (1971-1977), which did a Spider-Man segment, and he brought home the Spider-Man comic books the writers had access to when writing these segments. Joss apparently devoured these comics and would later write Marvel comics and direct Marvel Comics films like The Avengers/Avengers Assemble. Another influence on Whedon was the bard, Willam Shakespeare. Joss, according to Lavery, studied Shakespeare extensively at Winchester and loved his plays and the sonnets, a love reflected in Whedon's low budget independent 2012 adaptation of the bards Much Ado About Nothing and in his extensive references to Shakespeare in Buffy. Still another influence on Whedon was film. Joss studied film at Wesleyan under noted film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who, unusually among film studies scholars these days has actually seen a lot of films, something essential if one is going to study cinema, and noted cultural scholar Richard Slotkin. Whedon was not only a student of fiims, however, as Lavery notes. He was a cinephile or a film head, something reflected, for example, in Whedon's references to the films of Sam Peckinpah in Buffy. All of these elements, according to Lavery, were chanelled by Whedon into his creative life and all of them are reflected in his television shows, films, webisodes, and comic books, all instances in which Whedon was able to create images of great scope within the confines and constraints of corporate entertainment media culture.
I liked Lavery's creative biography of Joss Whedon, who I have been interested in since watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television now many years ago, and regard it as one of the most creative things I have ever seen or read in my almost seventy years of life thanks to its mix of comedy, drama, tragedy, parody, satire and wit, its genre blending, and its gender bending. It is thus hard if not impossible not to agree with Lavery's conclusion that Joss Whedon is one of the major contemporary creative artists and auteurs of his generation. Lavery's Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait. However, there are a number of problems or issues I have with the book as well. Unfortunately, Lavery's book seems more the work of a fan scholar or a scholar fan
than of an academic despite the fact that Lavery is an academic and does engage, if fitfully in the book, in
academic analysis. One presumes, fairly I think,
that Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait, was primarily aimed or targeted, by
Lavery and his publisher, at the Whedon fan demographic and this fact makes the book more fanboy and fangirl oriented than scholarly. The work of
scholar fans or fan scholars is, of course, and this is where the
problem comes in, invariably impacted by value, something that, like
beauty, is ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. And while
there is nothing wrong with being a fan of someone or something it is
critically important to recognise that normative approaches, which are
the bedrock and at the heart of fan culture and fan analysis, an approach which generally ends up celebrating the artist, a political figure, or a religious
figure of devotion, turning him or her into a kind of saint and their "products" into holy documents, is different by degree from a descriptive
analysis that seeks to fully and fairly comprehend the work of a
celebrated artist like Joss Whedon in its broader contexts in a fair,
balanced, and dispassionate way.
Another problem I have with the book is that Lavery too lightly and too uncritically explores how Whedon benefited from something sociologists are quite familiar with, namely, the role social and cultural capital--familiar and institutional--played and play in Whedon's ability to be creative and in his ability to instantiate (make his art flesh) his creativity in economic institutions associated with the entertainment industry. Whedon's grandfather and father were, after all, television writers and apparently Joss's father was able to help him get early writing gigs in Hollywood when Joss moved to Los Angeles to live with his father after graduating from Wesleyan. Speaking of Wesleyan, Wesleyan, thanks, in particular, to Basinger, has itself developed, a cozy networking relationship with Hollywood, and Basinger, as Lavery notes, was able to arrange a job for Whedon as a researcher at the American Film Institute, thanks to her and Wesleyan's network connections with contemporary Hollywood. Power, privilege, authority, and their associated networks, along with social and cultural capital, familial, institutional, and cultural, things like pre-existing narrative and generic forms, do matter, when it comes to channeling creativity into creative projects.
A further problem is that Lavery relies too exclusively on interviews and on DVD commentaries to tell his tale of Joss Whedon's creativity. This reliance on Whedon's telling of the tale of his own creative life is a problem because, as ethnographers learned long ago, informants are not always forthcoming when it comes to the truth or at least elements of the truth. Manipulation of the truth, of course, has historically been a problem, particularly when studying Hollywood, a industry where propaganda, propaganda about celebrities, films, and telvision programmes, often seems Hollywood's very raison d'etre. In fact, one might compellingly argue that it was Hollywood that pioneered and perfected the modernist variant of bullshiting that has become endemic in the modern and postmodern world. Given this, it is essential that analysts be critically skeptical of informant statements and check and verify or falsify them by following subjects and ascertaining whether they really do as they say they do, such as going to church every Sunday, or check and verify or falsify information and data against other available oral or written primary source material.
Of course, the primary source material in its various forms one is cross checking against can and does have its own inherent problems. The labour intensive process of separating fact from fiction in Hollywood and beyond can often seem somewhat akin to the questionable art of divination or the punishment meted out by Zeus to Sisyphus. The release and collection of additional primary source material may clarify certain
problematic contextual, exegetical, and hermeneutical issues, or it may make the attempt to discern the truth even more difficult than it already was. Has, for instance,
the release of Whedon's script for Wonder Woman over the internet, a script that has garnered both lukewarm praise and harsh ideological damnation, or the release of Zak Snyder's cut of the Warner Brothers
Justice League
film, a film which was reassigned to Whedon who took it over and rewrote and reshot it (Whedon version, 2017, Snyder
version released 2021), which has garnered angelic praise from the fandom of Snyder, helped clarify certain exegetical or interpretive issues or
made them muddier? Only time will tell. While Lavery's book does take note of some contradictory evidence surrounding Whedon, its
grounding almost exclusively in interviews and commentaries done by Whedon, makes Whedon's
public voice, and this may be a problem as I noted above, the voice of authority. As
recent ethnographers and ethnologists have noted again and again, who is doing the narrating and why he or she is narrating the story
in the way that they are, can and often does muddy the already opaque waters of scholarly and academic analysis. In the end we cannot forget that primary source materials of all stripes are embedded in a sea of fan apologetics and
polemics making analysis and interpretation difficult.
A related problem with Lavery's book, along with many of the books produced by Literary, Film, and Television
Studies scholars these days, is its limited use of history. Lavery doesn't fall into the same trap that many if not most crystal
ball textualists, those Media Studies scholars who think that everything
you need to know about a book, a film, or a television programme can
be discerned by an application of nineteenth century social science, the
notion that underlying economic, political, cultural, geographic, or
demographic factors undergird and determine a text, fall into. Lavery's book avoids the historical ahistoricism of much crystal ball textualism by taking a somewhat chronological and hence limitedly historical approach to the Whedon texts, thanks to its limited use of extra-textual interviews and commentaries and its chronological structure. However, such an approach misses the fact that a text is not only impacted by broader contexts like those the crystal ball textualists focus on--class, ethnicity/race, and gender--but also by material cultural artifacts within those broader contexts, such as other cultural texts. Buffy, for instance, has echoes of the Canadian-American television show Friday the 13th: the Series (1987-1990) with its supernatural investigators who are kind of a Scooby gang before the Scooby gang, while Angel, the Buffy spin-off Whedon and David Greenwalt has echoes of the Canadian-American TV programme Forever Knight (1992-1996) with its vampire seeking redemption, its mythological arcs, its similar use of flashbacks, its similar feminism, its similar refined old world vamps meeting the often unrefined modern new world, and its similar mixtures of drama, tragedy, and comedy. Unfortunately, Lavery does not investigate the possible influence of these two programmes on Buffy and Angel while Forever Knight gets little more than namechecked in the monograph on the show for the Wayne State University TV Milestones series by "leading" Angel authority Stacey Abbott's (2009). I suspect this lack of attention to historical pedigree, a lack that often finds in academic fan culture, is the product of a culture, a fan culture grounded in a celebration of a creative and charismatic individual and his or her works and the consequent tunnel vision associated with such a fan culture.
Finally, Lavery's book was written before accusations of harassment surfaced in Hollywood about Whedon beginning in 2020, in the wake of a number of allegations and revelations about a number of Hollwood figures (some of which had been known for some time as Peter Biskind's book on American iindependent film makes clear). Whedon was accused, by some who had worked with him, of authoritarian behaviour, bullying, snarkiness, anti-religious rhetoric, and mental torment, all hardly unknown in a variety of quarters in Hollywood since its beginnings in the early part of the twentieth century. Interestingly, and in retrospect, Whedon's questionable behaviour and several of his failings, including his failings on set, seem to be referenced by Whedon in several of the interviews Lavery references in his book. In one or more of these interviews Whedon maintains that he had to play the adult on set sometimes and though this doesn't excuse his behaviours it does point up the fact that a kind of general or conductor is needed on a Hollywood television set since, if you are lucky, you have eight days to make an episode. We also need to understand that sometimes things happen which can cause tensions on a Hollywood set between actor and show runners, such as, for example, an actor getting pregnant and not telling those she works with that she is pregnant until just before shooting starts. This, of course, can be a problem if the writers have already planned out a season of the show and now have to revise the show to take account of an unexpected occurence.
While not the definitive biography of Whedon, that awaits a future scholar who has access to all the relevant primary source materials, Lavery's book, I suspect, will remain one of the go to books on Whedon and on Whedon's creative life in academia for the foreseeable future. Lavery's book nicely synthesises and puts into chronological focus a wealth of interviews and commentaries relating to the creative life and work of Joss Whedon, most of it from Whedon himself, which, while not ideal from a scholarly point of view, is a step in the right direction, particularly when compared with previous biographies on Joss Whedon. It also synthesises and summarises a host of more academic oriented studies on Whedon, many of them from the journal on Whedon's work Lavery founded, Slayage, both of which are helpful to anyone starting work or continuing work on the creative output of Joss Whedon's career thus far.
Recommended.
Postscript:
i do know that there is an essay out there in anthology land that explores and compares Forever Knight and Angel. I haven't had a chance to read it, however, though I applaud the historical and cultural comparison.
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