A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Interpreting Television

 

You wouldn't know it from watching reaction videos to Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire on YouTube, but there are several ways one can analyse a sophisticated (multi-tonal, multi-generic, novelistic, reflexive) television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One, for instance, can analyse Buffy on the literal or surface level by focusing on the story or stories the show tells. One can, in other words, explore the plot, narrative, and characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer though novelistic plotting and narrative are not fully grasped by most reactors who don't understand that early chapters or episodes of the novel provide the template and foundation for what comes after. One can analyse Buffy normatively or emotionally, though hopefully only after gaining a familiarity with the story or stories Buffy tells. This is, generally speaking, the me likee or me don't likee level of "analysis". One can analyse the metaphorical or allegorical level of Buffy. One of the key metaphors in the high school years of Buffy is the high school as hell metaphor and the vampires, demons, and monsters that represent or reflect that key metaphor in seasons one through three of the show, though the metaphors don't end there. One can analyse the mythological or world building aspects of Buffy and the logic of that created world. Vampires in Buffy, for instance, go "poof" when they are slain and hardly anyone knows that Buffy is the slayer, the fighter of killers, demons, vampires, and other things that go bump in the night, a "reality", noted in the second part of the very first episode of the series. One can analyse Buffy on the social ethical level. Buffy reflects Joss Whedon's social ethical existentialism, an existentialism where good and evil are more grey than black and white and in which the "good" fight is often less than epic and never ends. One can analyse the mise-en-scene of Buffy, the everything that is within the fame of Buffy and how it is edited together. One of the art class instruments to the left of the fame is, for instance, askew in the Buffy episode "The Body" as Buffy tells Dawn, in the frame within the frame (something that makes Dawn's art class as it looks through the window frame at Dawn and Buffy outside the classroom and us viewers as we look through the frame within the frame voyeurs of something inherently intimate), that their mother has died suddenly, an askewness that reflects the askewness Joyce's death brings with it not only for Buffy and Dawn but for a the entire Scooby gang whose surrogate "mother" Joyce was. The degree of sophistication of literal, normative, metaphorical/allegorical, mythological, mise-en-scene, and social ethical analysis, of course, can vary greatly since they are all intimately tied to the degree of cultural capital.

Not all of these levels of analysis, hence, are tabula rasa or self-evident. One learns the various ways to analyse a television show, a film, or a book through education, study, and schooling and the cultural capital one accrues through one's life course. If the evidence of social media is prologue most of those who react to Buffy start and stop at the simplest levels of analysis, the literal and the normative. EvilQK, one of the Buffy reactors chosen at random for observation, for instance, summarises or tries to summarise the story of the previous episode of Buffy she watched at the beginning of each subsequent reaction video after her reaction to the first episode of Buffy "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest". Her reactions are salt and peppered with comments about liking certain characters, liking mean girls, not liking certain clothes the characters wear (sans any reflection on what the clothes characters wear reflect about them), prognostication, and comments saying that would never happen, a curious response to a television show about vampires who aren't, of course, real. But then those who engage in literalist and normative "criticism" are often embedded in a simplistic and unreflective ideology of realism, a notion that television, film, and television must, on some level, be real and realistic. Buffy, by the way, is very "realistic" on the emotional level exploring as it does the pain of life. 

In the end, most reaction videos on YouTube are not that different from what one would expect of a junior or senior high school student. They summarise and likee or not likee. That many YouTube reactors, many of whom presumably have attended college and university college and university degrees, rarely move beyond the literal and normative levels points up how so many contemporary undergraduate colleges and universities have become more like high school since the 1970s since the rise of literalist, fundamentalist, and consumerist oriented bah humbug neo-liberalism which is slowly but surely killing liberal education.

 

The Books of My Life: Joss Whedon (Pascale)

I have never really been enamoured of biographies, particularly biographies published primarily for the fanboy and fangirl market. Popular biographies have always seemed to me to have several almost insurmountable problems. They don't, for instance, seem to be grounded in any sort of idea about what is significant (economically, politically, culturally, demographically, or geographically) and what is not. As a result, many of them are encyclopedic including within their pages almost anything that seems to fit between its covers regardless of whether it is important or not (the kitchen sink approach to biography). Additionally, they generally take a non-critical stance to their subject. They too often fail to recognise that the interviews and the oral histories they draw on, particularly those done with Hollywood popular culture notables who are still alive, are rarely if ever objective or dispassionate and thus require a critical perspective from anyone engaged in biographical retellings, something we rarely get in fanboy and fan girl biographies of their heroes. Finally, they are often, and in the case of popular culture figures usually are, written by devotees of the subject of the biography and thus represent a kind of latter day version of the early first century lives of Christian saints. They are too often, in other words, hagiographic.

Amy Pascale's Joss Whedon, Geek King of the Universe: A Biography (London: Aurum, 2014)  is a well written and well researched biography of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century auteur Joss Whedon. Joss Whedon tells the tale of the life and work of television and film celebrity, writer, director, and producer Joss Whedon in extensive and impressive detail, from his birth in 1964 in New York City to the release of his blockbuster movie The Avengers/Avengers Assemble and the release of his art film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, both in the year 2012.

To Pascale's credit, while her biography of Whedon is to a large extent hagiographic, it also gives readers a glimpse of a Joss Whedon and the shows that he has created with some warts. Pascale notes, for instance, that there was tension on the Buffy set between Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, David Boreanaz, who played Angel in Buffy and in its spinoff Angel (1999-2004), and other members of the cast and crew. Some members of the cast and crew, apparently, felt that there was too much star behaviour from the two on set. Pascale notes that there were tensions between Buffy's cast and crew and Jeff Pruitt, who was responsible for the stunts on Buffy seasons two through four when he was made redundant. These tensions spilled over to the official posting board of the show, the Bronze, when Pruitt posted his version about why he and his wife, Buffy's stunt double Sophia Crawford, were let go from the show, posts Whedon responded to on the Bronze. Pascale notes that there were tensions between Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase in Buffy and Angel, and Whedon. Carpenter, after she got pregnant apparently necessitating the reworking of several Angel episodes, was fired at the end of season four of that show leaving her feeling, she says, "blindsided" and "heartbroken". Carpenter would be brought back and her character arc wrapped up in the 100th episode of the show. Pascale notes that there was tension between Vincent Kartheiser, who played Angel's son Connor on Angel, and Angel's writers and show runners including Whedon. Kartheiser apparently felt that his character was superfluous and caught in a seemingly never ending narrative loop. 

Whedon himself has implied on several occasions in a number of interviews he has given over the years--some of which are referenced in Pascale's book--that it was sometimes necessary for him to act like the adult on set, that he oftentimes had to play the role of general on his shows, and that he could get upset when lines he wrote for Buffy were not delivered in the way he wanted. Whedon, in other words, seems to admit in these interviews that he is at least a little bit of a bully and probably a lot of a bit of a perfectionist. Add to this the claims that Whedon was a womaniser, some of which he has denied, claims that came fast and furious in 2018 and 2020, and one can easily see why hagiographies, even hagiographies with some warts thrown in, like Pascale's, are problematic.

Many readers will probably want to know whether I found Pascale's biography of Whedon better than, the same, or worse than other biographies of Whedon. I haven't read Constance Haven's biography (Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy, Dallas: Benbella, 2003) so I can't compare this biography with that of Pascale's. I have read David Lavery's biography of Whedon (Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Marvel's Avengers, London: Tauris, 2014), a biography which "reads" Whedon's life and work through the prism of psychological theories of creativity. Of the two, I found--and I do realise that value is in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder--Pascale's biography more enlightening and educational than Lavery's. Pascale's biography is based on an enormous amount of research, including oral histories Pascale did with Whedon and others that knew him and worked with him and as such has all the advantages (and disadvantages), of a biography written by someone who is somewhat of an insider. Pascale was, after all, an early poster on the Bronze message board, a message board that many of those who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), including Whedon, visited and even posted on on occasion, and was later an attendee at the poster board parties that Whedon and others from Buffy attended. She thus had access to Whedon and his friends and co-workers in a way Lavery did not. Lavery's biography, which relies largely on already published interviews along with a few conversations with Whedon associates, is an outsider biography written by an academic who is also a Whedon fanboy and this schizophrenia negatively impacts, in my opinion, the quality of Lavery's book.  Lavery's biography is also constrained by the author's focus on artistic creativity making it somewhat, at least in my opinion, schematic.

I do hope, at some point, that those of us interested in Joss Whedon and his work will get a thorough, analytical, and scholarly biography of Whedon. Whedon, after all, is a key figure in American television history and for my money, Whedon's television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly (2002-2003) are amongst the finest television programmes and films I have ever seen and likely will ever see. Buffy and Firefly are, in my opinion, art of the highest order despite or in spite of being made within a Hollywood studio system that seems to prefer films with little plot and cardboard characters to multi-level narrative, plot, metaphor, and philosophical depth like the work of Whedon. Someday, once someone is able to gain access to all or most of the primary source material related to Whedon and his work we will, I hope, get the biography of Whedon, warts and all, this auteur deserves, a biography that will, like Buffy and Firefly themselves also stand the test of time. Until that time Pascale's fine if flawed scholarly fan biography will have to suffice.