The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or sub-discipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Riskpig Meets Buffy and Firefly

YouTube videos never cease to amaze me but then as a misanthrope I am a sucker for the inherent absurdity of human life. Today the YouTube video that did not cease to amaze me was a "reaction" to the season two episode of Buffy called "Passion" by a poster who calls herself RiskPig.

In the final minutes of this "reaction" the Goth kitted RiskPig makes some brief remarks on the differences between Buffy and Firefly which she notes she is watching at the same time as BtVS. According to RiskPig Firefly is more "intense" than Buffy because, she arges, Firefly requires less of a suspension of disbelief. One feels, at any moment she says, that any of the main characters might die even though none of them did through the course of the television show. It would not be until the movie Serenity that any of the major cast of characters in the show would die and those deaths may have been due more to the decisions of the actors not to return to the franchise should a subsequent movie be made, something that never came to pass given the lack of success--something that Hollywood defines purely in monetary terms--of Serenity at the all important box office.

There are major problem with RiskPig's hypothesis. Before I discuss these problems, however, I should note something critically important at least for those of us with an scholarly and empirical bent. At the time that RiskPig offered her observation on "Passion" she had only watched Buffy up to "Passion", the seventeenth episode of season two. Since Buffy ran for 144 episodes and was a show about the loss of innocence as one grew up--it is a bildungsroman--one can compellingly argue that RisPig had jumped the gun at least a bit. Scholars, before they offer analyses of their object of study, prefer to look at all the evidence before they jump over the interpretive cliff. By the way, I should also point out that by the time Riskpig watched "Passion" she had reacted to all but episode 14 of Firefly, the 14th episode being the last episode of the show, a show shown out of order by the braniacs at Fox and a show that was cancelled before all the episodes of season one were completed. A movie, a movie that according to sources was originally meant to be the season two finale of the show before it was cancelled in 2003 by the suits at Fox, followed two years later.

Now back to the problems with RiskPig's hypotheses about the differences between Buffy and Firefly. RiskPig misses the fact that Buffy is, as I noted earlier, a bildungsroman and that this fact matters when comparing Buffy to Firefly The fact that Buffy is a bildungsroman makes Buffy far more structurally, generically, and tonally a more innovative television show than Firefly. Firefly is, like another of Whedon's adult oriented shows, Angel, a more traditional show. Both Buffy and Firefly may play with metaphors. Firefly, however, given that it is an adult show, plays less with metaphors than does Buffy. Firefly's one major metaphor is the one that plays off the differences between the core nations and the modern nations in the late 20th century world. The Alliance, for example, is a metaphor for the core nations of today, the rich Western nations of the contemporary world that design product in the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery and exploit the resources of the periphery, the global capitalist "frontier", so they can make mass marketed consumer goods relatively cheaply. The frontier planets, the outback planets, the bush planets, the places that want to be left alone by the Alliance but aren't, which is why Captain Malcolm Reynolds, keeps pushing his Firefly class ship named Serenity further and further into the black, further and further into space, in other words, each year, are metaphors for the wilderness. Whedon, after all, it should be remembered, studied with Richard Slotkin, author of a highly regarded trilogy on the history of the culture and mythology of the American frontier, including its culture of violence, from its beginnings in the 1600s to the 20th century. Buffy's metaphors, on the other hand, are embedded in the monsters of each episode of the show and sometimes in its longer season, series, and character arcs.  So while both Buffy and Firefly, work several levels--the literal plot and narrative level, the the metaphorical/allegorical level and the mythological worldbuilding level (which includes existentialist and theological themes)  Buffy is much more complex because it intersects its metaphors much more extensively with adolescent and young adult life cycles, life cycles that, in turn, intersect with a variety of economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic forces.

RiskPig also misses important similarities between Buffy and Firefly. Both, not surprisingly, share similar themes. They are, after all, both authored by Joss Whedon. Both explore issues like chosen families, and existentialist choice. Both are also heavily influenced by Whedon's love of classic cinema, the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford in particular. Firefly, for instance, is Ford's Stagecoach in space--a film that was adapted from Maupassant's brilliant short story "Boule de Suif"--and combined with the tough professionalism and chosen family themes at the heart of the films of Hawks. The suspense in both Buffy and Firefly is, of course, quite indebted to Hitch, the master of the thriller who no one working in the industry today can come close to matching. 

Finally, what RiskPig, like most of her other amateur fellow "reactors" typically miss is the fact that literature, films, and television, are not real and can never be real anymore than opera or operetta can be "real". Even documentaries are manipulated through the use of editing and music, to note just two ways docs are manipulated by their makers. It is this uninterrogated faith, a faith akin to a belief in resurrection, the virgin birth, or reincarnation, in "realism" or naturalism, a term I have never heard one "reactor" use, that is a major problem in the "reactions" of most YouTube reactors. It is a faith, an almost cult like faith, which has socially and culturally constructed a very narrow and parochial conception of aesthetics, a term I really shouldn't use for "reaction" videos, a conception of aesthetics that deletes other approaches to art--allegorical, impressionism, expressionist, dadaist, surrealist, theatrical--from its approach to art. It is a narrow conception of art which would celebrate a colour photograph of the Rouen Cathedral by a tourist as superior to the impressionist paintings of the same cathedral by Claude Monet because it is more "real". One wonders if these true believing amateurs are even aware of the fact that Monet painted the cathedral in different ways in order to, paradoxically, capture how the cathedral looked like at different times of the day in different light, to capture it more realistically or scientifically, in other words They certainly don't seem to aware of the fact that notions of realism have differed across time and continue to differ in Western theoretical discourses.