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Feb. 21st, 2021 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Hmmm...this is an interesting essay, which I kind of disagree with.
Buffy Revisited Through Whedon Allegations
I honestly think you can analyze anything a certain way if you want to badly enough. I remember my brother and his friend trying to convince me that the soap opera The Guiding Light's - iconic lighthouse was a phallic symbol. (Uh, no. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar folks.)
Here, I'm kind of going yes, okay, possibly, nodding along until I hit this paragraph:
An example of this is one of the most awful episodes, when Spike attempts to rape Buffy. The scene is stomach-churning, not in the least because it is played for maximum distress (and traumatized actors during filming). This scene pokes another hole in Whedon's self-proclaimed feminism: that women can only be really strong if the source of their power comes from their sexuality or from "overcoming" trauma. Of course Faith, another slayer, is promiscuous. Of course sex with Buffy turns Angel evil — her sexualized teen body is that powerful.
The rape scene seems totally out of character and to come out of nowhere, though Whedon stated his reasoning was to remind viewers that Spike is a vampire and therefore "soulless." What's the easiest way to do that? Have a sympathetic and frankly, non-toxic male character suddenly rape.
So, did this woman skip S2? Or miss the fact that Spike was set up as a sexual predator in S2 - S6?
Also, the idea for that scene wasn't Whedon's - but Marti, and it was written by Deknight, Jane Espenson, and I think David Fury. They famously did a podcast interview after it aired and broke it down with the interviewers on the Succubus Club, we all transcribed it for Buffy fanboards.
See this is the problem with people re-watching things after they find out personal or private information about what has happening behind the scenes, the details of which are incredibly vague, and reported twenty years after the fact, and various parties staying silent regarding them. You want to read all sorts of crazy things into it.
I was taught not to do that in undergrad - and to be careful to apply a more critical and objective eye.
Also, Spike - "A Non-toxic male character" ??? This person was not on the same Buffy boards that I was on. I had to re-read that sentence twice.
"Out of nowhere?" - I saw it coming a mile away. I mean they kept foreshadowing it.
Also part of the point of Buffy was a critique of toxic male culture in violent westerns and slasher pictures in the 1970s-90s. Buffy started in the 1990s - and in direct reaction to horror films like Scream, which had popped up shortly before it. It was satirizing a lot of that toxic male culture.
With Buffy taking out the male vampires - often a metaphor for sexual violence with a phallic symbol - the stake. It explored the misogynistic nerd as the villains, and their inability to handle women. They were shown as the villains and weak. Notably no male has power in Buffy, unless they become a vampire or are turned into a monster.
The women have the power.
2. I also saw an essay about Xander as the epitome of misogyny. Really? I think you are confusing him with Warren. And there are quite a few women and men loved Xander and did not see him that way. I may have disagreed with them at times, but I can see their perspective. And could defend it. I have defended it - in numerous essays.
Quiet Misogyny in Buffy
Huh? I'm sorry, the writers were blatantly exposing the misogyny in our culture and calling our attention to it. It wasn't celebrating it - just the opposite. Willow's scene in Villains with Warren - dissects misogyny at its base. And in S7 Buffy takes down the bad guy - a misogynist empowered by the First Evil - who has given birth to vampires. The vampires in Whedon's stories are in a part a metaphor for sexual violence and misogyny.
He's showing the reality of it. It's not exploitive or romanticized. It's painful and horrifying. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a horror series, it wasn't a romantic teen soap like the Vampire Diaries and Legacies. It was horror. Horror isn't nice and fuzzy.
They were showing the dark side of human nature and questioning it. There's a lot of good stuff in this series. Don't dismiss it out of hand or review it based on what may have happened twenty years ago to several cast members behind the scenes. I seriously doubt anyone who came forward would want you to view their work or the series in that manner.
SMG pretty much states that, as does everyone else. It was a toxic work environment but the end product is still meaningful. You can separate behavior from a person and from art, it is possible. It just requires a little critical thinking to do so.
3. I think Screen Logic's essay handles it best... A Teachable Moment in Cognitive Dissonance After Joss Whedon
Many People Worked Hard on These Projects Beyond the Disgraced Figures
My answer is simply "Yes." You can still appreciate the art and those involved while tempering who you praise in the process. There was still a final season of House of Cards despite the allegations against star Kevin Spacey, who was fired prior to filming. You can still enjoy the work of the X-Men franchise even after what people found out about Bryan Singer. I don't think it's fair to judge anyone regardless if they support or identify as part of the LGBTQ community if they still love the Harry Potter franchise despite J.K. Rowling's TERF beliefs.
It's hard to keep track of everything because what's done is already done, and nothing is going to erase what's in the can. We can only do things that affect the present and in the future. Obviously, there's a line of which you can't think of things the same way again, but at the same time, a lot of hard-working people put in their soul to create what you love. Can you imagine shuttering away in a vault every single thing that had Harvey Weinstein's name on it? It would deprive such a significant piece of cinema history away that doesn't make any practical sense to punish those who weren't involved. The way we learn and what is a teachable moment is to just speak up while we can and do what we can now because the worst that can happen is nothing is said, and suffering continues.
I agree. I'm not sure it matters right now, what these people did in the past as a pandemic roars in the background. The US is pretty close to the 500,000 death milestone. We've lost 500,000 people to COVID-19 in this country.
And we're addressing toxic workplaces and hunting ways to stop them. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but we are making progress.
Buffy Revisited Through Whedon Allegations
I honestly think you can analyze anything a certain way if you want to badly enough. I remember my brother and his friend trying to convince me that the soap opera The Guiding Light's - iconic lighthouse was a phallic symbol. (Uh, no. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar folks.)
Here, I'm kind of going yes, okay, possibly, nodding along until I hit this paragraph:
An example of this is one of the most awful episodes, when Spike attempts to rape Buffy. The scene is stomach-churning, not in the least because it is played for maximum distress (and traumatized actors during filming). This scene pokes another hole in Whedon's self-proclaimed feminism: that women can only be really strong if the source of their power comes from their sexuality or from "overcoming" trauma. Of course Faith, another slayer, is promiscuous. Of course sex with Buffy turns Angel evil — her sexualized teen body is that powerful.
The rape scene seems totally out of character and to come out of nowhere, though Whedon stated his reasoning was to remind viewers that Spike is a vampire and therefore "soulless." What's the easiest way to do that? Have a sympathetic and frankly, non-toxic male character suddenly rape.
So, did this woman skip S2? Or miss the fact that Spike was set up as a sexual predator in S2 - S6?
Also, the idea for that scene wasn't Whedon's - but Marti, and it was written by Deknight, Jane Espenson, and I think David Fury. They famously did a podcast interview after it aired and broke it down with the interviewers on the Succubus Club, we all transcribed it for Buffy fanboards.
See this is the problem with people re-watching things after they find out personal or private information about what has happening behind the scenes, the details of which are incredibly vague, and reported twenty years after the fact, and various parties staying silent regarding them. You want to read all sorts of crazy things into it.
I was taught not to do that in undergrad - and to be careful to apply a more critical and objective eye.
Also, Spike - "A Non-toxic male character" ??? This person was not on the same Buffy boards that I was on. I had to re-read that sentence twice.
"Out of nowhere?" - I saw it coming a mile away. I mean they kept foreshadowing it.
Also part of the point of Buffy was a critique of toxic male culture in violent westerns and slasher pictures in the 1970s-90s. Buffy started in the 1990s - and in direct reaction to horror films like Scream, which had popped up shortly before it. It was satirizing a lot of that toxic male culture.
With Buffy taking out the male vampires - often a metaphor for sexual violence with a phallic symbol - the stake. It explored the misogynistic nerd as the villains, and their inability to handle women. They were shown as the villains and weak. Notably no male has power in Buffy, unless they become a vampire or are turned into a monster.
The women have the power.
2. I also saw an essay about Xander as the epitome of misogyny. Really? I think you are confusing him with Warren. And there are quite a few women and men loved Xander and did not see him that way. I may have disagreed with them at times, but I can see their perspective. And could defend it. I have defended it - in numerous essays.
Quiet Misogyny in Buffy
Huh? I'm sorry, the writers were blatantly exposing the misogyny in our culture and calling our attention to it. It wasn't celebrating it - just the opposite. Willow's scene in Villains with Warren - dissects misogyny at its base. And in S7 Buffy takes down the bad guy - a misogynist empowered by the First Evil - who has given birth to vampires. The vampires in Whedon's stories are in a part a metaphor for sexual violence and misogyny.
He's showing the reality of it. It's not exploitive or romanticized. It's painful and horrifying. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a horror series, it wasn't a romantic teen soap like the Vampire Diaries and Legacies. It was horror. Horror isn't nice and fuzzy.
They were showing the dark side of human nature and questioning it. There's a lot of good stuff in this series. Don't dismiss it out of hand or review it based on what may have happened twenty years ago to several cast members behind the scenes. I seriously doubt anyone who came forward would want you to view their work or the series in that manner.
SMG pretty much states that, as does everyone else. It was a toxic work environment but the end product is still meaningful. You can separate behavior from a person and from art, it is possible. It just requires a little critical thinking to do so.
3. I think Screen Logic's essay handles it best... A Teachable Moment in Cognitive Dissonance After Joss Whedon
Many People Worked Hard on These Projects Beyond the Disgraced Figures
My answer is simply "Yes." You can still appreciate the art and those involved while tempering who you praise in the process. There was still a final season of House of Cards despite the allegations against star Kevin Spacey, who was fired prior to filming. You can still enjoy the work of the X-Men franchise even after what people found out about Bryan Singer. I don't think it's fair to judge anyone regardless if they support or identify as part of the LGBTQ community if they still love the Harry Potter franchise despite J.K. Rowling's TERF beliefs.
It's hard to keep track of everything because what's done is already done, and nothing is going to erase what's in the can. We can only do things that affect the present and in the future. Obviously, there's a line of which you can't think of things the same way again, but at the same time, a lot of hard-working people put in their soul to create what you love. Can you imagine shuttering away in a vault every single thing that had Harvey Weinstein's name on it? It would deprive such a significant piece of cinema history away that doesn't make any practical sense to punish those who weren't involved. The way we learn and what is a teachable moment is to just speak up while we can and do what we can now because the worst that can happen is nothing is said, and suffering continues.
I agree. I'm not sure it matters right now, what these people did in the past as a pandemic roars in the background. The US is pretty close to the 500,000 death milestone. We've lost 500,000 people to COVID-19 in this country.
And we're addressing toxic workplaces and hunting ways to stop them. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but we are making progress.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-24 01:29 pm (UTC)Well the Carpenter thing is more complicated than a lot of people realize. She was apparently problematic on both Buffy and Angel. There's an indication from Kai Cole's letter, and other reports that she more than likely had been having an affair with David Greenwalt (sp?) who specifically asked for her to go to Angel. Greenwalt was the show-runner for Angel up to S3. During S3 - WB and Fox got fed up with Carpenter and Greenwalt who were apparently causing delays and running up costs. So they asked Whedon, Greenwalt's producing partner to step in. Greenwalt got off easy - and he shouldn't have, considering he was the show-runner not Charisma. And keep in mind during all of this? Boreanze was a prankster, who flashed people on the sets. But they basically gave Greenwalt a slap on the wrist, and he got another show - with no problems, and left shiny. Meanwhile, Whedon decided to come up with a story arc that would write Charisma out of the show - and cause the fans to hate her character enough - to get rid of her. Instead of just firing her at the end of S3 or telling her that the studio was having issues with her behavior - like he had done with Greenwalt, he decided to make her the Big Bad for S4 and have either Angel or Connor kill her off.
But Charisma got pregnant over the summer - which pissed him off royally. So he punished her for destroying his evil plan to write her out as the Big Bad (kind of hard to have a Big Bad Pregnant Lady). As a result when he fired her - everyone assumed it was because of her pregnancy, and the story annoyed everyone, because it made no sense.
In way it's worse than people realize. It's also ironic, because her pregnancy saved Cordelia from character assassination by the creator.
So, basically David Greenwalt didn't get punished for the problems on the set, Charisma did. Which is bizarre. Since Greenwalt was the boss.
That said...I agree:
I personally think that bosses that create a toxic work environment tend to be pretty terrible people. I do think that he was probably enabled quite a bit by the studio(s) and allowed to get away with bad behaviour. However, I don't think that Whedon being a crappy boss who said some pretty awful things to Carpenter automatically makes him a misogynist. And so on.
Agreed. He had issues with Charisma and the character of Cordelia, who he felt she was exactly like. And who most likely reminded him of the mean girls he knew in high school. Charisma had issues with other people as well. It was not a happy set. J August and Acker couldn't stand David Boreanze. Nor could Adam Baldwin.
I've had bosses who had issues with me because I happened to remind them of someone else, doesn't necessarily make them a misogynist or a terrible person. Just nasty to me.
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Date: 2021-02-24 03:51 pm (UTC)Wow! I did not know any of that. If even a quarter of it is true, it further complicates the whole issue. It seems as if ATS was extremely toxic all around. That said, it doesn't let Whedon off the hook for his own bad behaviour. It also raises the question of how much was bad behaviour was the studio (or studios) willing to allow or just ignore in order to profit from the show. It makes me question the official line of ATS being cancelled because it did poorly in reruns.
I still think that trying to destroy a character because you personally don't like an actress is not ideal behaviour. I also don't think that diva/bad behaviour deserves to be punished by further bad behaviour.
I also don't think that fandom should be out there destroying Whedon or his work. To the best of my knowledge, he's been accused of being a terrble boss, who has said terrible and demeaning things, who was toxic to work with for some people and allowed for a toxic workplace to flourish. And it sounds like he did all of this with the studio's backing. The situation is a little more nuanced than it appears. People that are picking apart his work are failing to understand that his body of work was influenced by common tropes in the genres, by what the studio(s) wanted, and by other players (i.e. other writers, producers, directors, etc). I truly feel that we've never going to know the full truth of what happened and who allowed for it all to happen. I think that tearing apart BtvS, Ats or his other shows/movies/projects, tends to over-simplify things. It's one thing to point out that quite a bit of "his work" can be problematic and that as the titular head of those projects, he could have done better. However, I think the whole mess is just far too nuanced for fans to be sitting there and extrapolating that Whedon must be terrible or the allegations are true because if you look at BtVS and AtS there are problematic issues with the shows.
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Date: 2021-02-24 06:17 pm (UTC)I so agree. There's people stating that they could tell from the Buffy comics - except Whedon wasn't really that involved. Also, the show-runner of the Buffy comics was Scott Allie - he was the editor, and he's a nightmare, and another sci-fi writer guy, whose name I can't remember. Whedon didn't really write them.
Just because you dislike something in a work of art doesn't automatically make the work terrible or the individual bad. Zack Snyder from all reports is lovely guy, but his movies are VERY dark and to some folks highly questionable in content. (Although to date the only people I know of that hated Snyders films are online white male social media friends over the age of 40. While the ones who love it - are POC women and men that I know in person. Also Ray Fisher loves Snyder's work as does Israeli Gail Gadot, and Jason Momoa.) Alfred Hitchcock is arguably an excellent director but guilty of horrible behavior. The list is endless.
I saw people trying to rip apart Woody Allen and Michael Jackson's work. All of Allen's films are bad? Really? I've seen them, and I do not agree. Although I admittedly hate "Manhattan", and Jackson? He wrote amazing music. I can love an artists work and denounce their behavior. They aren't one thing. Yes, it makes it a lot easier to just write people off as good or evil, but that's not true for the most part.
I also don't think that fandom should be out there destroying Whedon or his work. To the best of my knowledge, he's been accused of being a terrble boss, who has said terrible and demeaning things, who was toxic to work with for some people and allowed for a toxic workplace to flourish. And it sounds like he did all of this with the studio's backing. The situation is a little more nuanced than it appears.
I would agree. I'm actually more suspicious of the WB - all the allegations have WB in common. Firefly and Dollhouse were FOX, and Avengers - Disney. But ATS, BVTS, and Justice League were WB.
And Fisher is actually after the WB not Whedon. The WB is throwing Whedon under the bus to save themselves. And it was the WB that made Justice League a mess. And the WB that asked Whedon to fire CC. Also ATS was cancelled because WB refused to provide Whedon with a definite answer - the show was doing well actually in the ratings, but the WB and UPN were in the process of being combined and sold to CW. (No one knew that.) And when Whedon pushed them to give him an answer - they said fine - cancelled. Whedon got into a fight with WB.
The MT and Amber allegations are interesting - and I think more telling of an on-going toxic environment on the Buffy set. The fact that Gellar felt isolated towards the end, and Amber refused to come back for S7 - is kind of interesting. Also Marsters, Brendan, and others have relayed a lot of horror stories - it was not a pleasant set to work on.