I have a much more limited interest in Whedon's film work beyond his Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing and his nudge, nudge, wink wink horror film Cabin in the Woods, which he co-wrote with former Buffy writer Drew Goddard. I simply have zero interest in the now dominant Hollywood superhero films which stretch credibility beyond the breaking point for me and which are too adolescent for someone who never had to move beyond comic books because he almost never read them. So, it is unlikely that I will watch his Avengers/Avengers Assemble and its sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron unless they appear on television and there is no better alternative on other channels at the time they are broadcast.
Thanks to my adventures in the television worlds of Whedon, my interest in culture, and my interest in social and cultural theory, it was inevitable that I would begin to read books and articles on what has come to be called the Whedonverse. As posts on this blog indicate I have read a number of books on the televisual worlds of Joss Whedon and his collaborators. My latest literary excursion into the storytelling worlds of Joss Whedon and its contexts is a book by English Whedon scholar Matthew Pateman, Joss Whedon (Manchester, Eng: Manchester University Press, 2018), the author of a highly regarded in Whedon Studies circles previous book on Buffy entitled The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer published by McFarland in 2006.
Unlike David Lavery's creative biography of Whedon, Joss Whedon: A Creative Portrait published by Tauris in 2014, Pateman's book is, as Pateman emphasises, a critical and contextual analysis of the televisual work of Whedon. Pateman eschews biography and psychological detective work by focusing on Whedon's narrative art, his storytelling skills, and the intersection of these with Whedon's politics, which have often been seen as, as Pateman notes, liberal and feminist, instead. Divided into two parts, part one of Pateman's book explores the industrial and political aspects of Whedon's art while part two consists of several case studies of Whedon's storytelling art in Buffy, Angel (less so), Firefly, and Dollhouse, something that gives Pateman's Joss Whedon the quality of a collection of related essays.
There is a lot to admire in Pateman's book. I found his attempt to move beyond the pitfalls and pratfalls of crystal ball textualism with its Chomskyish everything you need to know about a media text you can find in that media text, commendable. I greatly appreciated Pateman's attempts to move beyond the text in his exploration of Whedon's politics, particularly his gender politics, in his attentiveness to the production processes of a television show, and in his attention to the collaborative nature of mass art. I particularly appreciated Pateman's attempt, with the help of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and beyond writer Jane Espenson, to explore the script writing processes practises that characterised the Whedonverse. Also worthy of praise is Pateman's emphasis not only on plot and character but on mise-en-scene. As such Pateman's book provides, I would argue, a better model for media analysis than much of what passes for media analysis in the text cenred media world these days.
On the other hand, there were a number of things that I found vexing about Pateman's book on the work of Joss Whedon. I found his formulaic critique of classical auteurist theory problematic. Yes, the auteurism of Cahiers critics and later filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard were polemical and ultimately individualist in orientation. However, many of those who adopted the policy of auteurism, like Andrew Sarris and many of the critics associated with Movie, did not simply adopt what might be called the Cahiers "romantic" approach to auteurism, they also adapted it. Many post-Cahiers auterists, for instance, foregrounded the fact that filmmaking was collaborative, that only a few Hollywood directors were auteurs, wrote about actors and writers and hinted that they too might be seen through the lens of auteurism, and emphasised that auteurism was a useful approach for organising and understanding the films produced Hollywood studio system before the break up of the Hollywood production, distribution, and exhibition system in 1948, at least in part. Like so many of the post-1960s film studies generations, Pateman seems not to have read much of classic auteurist theory--an approach that goes back at least to the 1920s--and seems to be more intent to create a straw man or woman he can play off of. It really is well past time for the younger generations of film and movie critics to move beyond these straw men and women arguments and go back to the diverse texts of post-World War II auteurism in order to tease out the various approaches to mass media authorship that were there from their post-World War II beginings, approaches that included Marxist approaches that were very, if selectively, contextual and critical of the romantic approach to artistic creativity.
Additionally, as is also the case with Lavery's creative biography, I found Pateman's reliance on a single source problematic. As ethnographers engaged in observation and historians working in archives know there are problems in relying on single informants or even a handful of informants. The information one gleans from them may very well be accurate but it must be checked against other sources, ethnographic and archival.
Finally, there is the related issue that Pateman has, like so many of his colleagues in film and television studies, written a book on an artistic figure who is still alive and well and who will, one presumes, continue to work in Hollywood despite the 2018 and 2022 revelations about his behaviour, revelations that led to Whedon's fall from grace in the eyes and hearts of some of his devotees, This means that Pateman's analysis and conclusions must remain somewhat tentative. Since Whedon is still alive and because Hollywood limits access to contemporary primary source material for a variety of reasons, scholars and analyists simply are unable at the moment to fully appraise Whedon's work. For this reason, Pateman's book, while interesting, useful, and praiseworthy in many respects, is inherently incomplete and as such tentative. As a consequence the authoritative and definitive work on the storytelling art of Joss Whedon and the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts that surrounded and impacted it, awaits some future biographer and critical analyst who has access to all relevant materials that are essential to understanding both Joss Whedon and his art.
Recommended.
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