Rev. of Reading Joss Whedon

Popular Culture Studies Journal

A review of Reading Joss Whedon, edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthia Masson, and David Lavery. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Reading Joss Whedon is not simply for those interested in Whedon or those interested in popular culture. It is an exemplar of how scholars can tackle the multi-variant works of one creator in our polymediated age.

Slayage, 2018

Faërian Drama is a term developed by J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” which he describes as plays which the elves present to men, with a “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism,” where the viewer feels he is “bodily inside its Secondary World” but instead is “in a dream that some other mind is weaving” (63-64). Smith of Wootton Major is a prime example from his own writing; other examples of the genre include A Christmas Carol or the movie Groundhog Day. When we read or view a work containing an example of faërian drama, we add a metafictional layer to the story: we are (or become) aware that the actor or character is experiencing the faërian drama, and part of our engagement as an audience rests in the tense anticipation of whether the character will realize she is in a faërian drama or not. A number of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer exhibit some characteristics of faërian drama: for example, “The Wish” (3.9) takes Cordelia into a world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale; “The Replacement” (5.3) lets Xander see what his life might be life without his insecurities; in “Hell’s Bells” (6.16) Xander is granted a distorted vision of his future life with Anya, and Anya experiences an opposing vision in “Selfless” (7.5). In this talk I will concentrate on “Normal Again” (6.17), a problematic episode which takes the Faërian drama idea in unexpected directions. Buffy is presented as an institutionalized mental patient lost in delusions of being the Slayer and being pressured to give up this fantasy life and join the “real” world. The ambiguity of the ending presents an unusual twist: the participant in the faërian drama chooses to stay within the fantasy world.

Opening title sequences play an important role in understanding television series. They are “a film within a film” whose “very purpose is to serve a whole array of functions: copyright law, economics, certification of employment in the context of careers, movie title, entertainment, commercials, fashion, and art” (Stanitzek 45, 46). Opening title sequences are but one example of what Gérard Genette terms paratexts, which are secondary texts that influence the reading of the primary text, such as book covers, title pages, author names, interviews, ads, reviews, and public responses. Genette likened paratexts to thresholds or vestibules, in line with Jorge Luis Borges’ description of prefaces (Genette 261). In film and television, opening title and closing credit sequences often function as the equivalent to the covers of a book, marking its beginning and end. Yet those metaphors are inexact. Some films eliminate the opening titles entirely (e.g. Citizen Kane (1941), Star Wars (1977), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)). On television, title sequences are increasingly contained within the text after a cold open, yet still serve to mark its borders. Lost (2004-2010) and Heroes (2006-2010) popularized the practice of showing only the series’ title, highlighting this function (Gray 74). Yet borders do more than mark territory: they also guide travelers. Like other paratexts, opening title sequences “guide the reader’s attention, influence how a text is read, and communicate such information as to give a text its first contours, its manageable identity so to speak. And paratexts are important not only for the process of textual reception but also for text production; they function as indicators to be aimed for, as structures of literary expectations” (Stanitzek 32). They are a film within a film that is both about the narrative and an independent creation. Even Lost’s sparse title sequence tells a story about the series’ themes of mystery, displacement, trauma, and insight through the rich cult television history of the score’s glissando and its tonal destabilisation (van Elferen 254-258), the title’s swirl evoking the series’ iconic plane crash as it moves from background to fall offscreen in the foreground, and its letters that come into momentary focus before clarity is once again lost. Opening title sequences are a form of narration, a pleasure in their own right, a genre of short filmmaking, and a mark of authorship,1 but not that of the auteur—as “it is the work of specialists, title sequence designers, themselves readers foremost” creating with incomplete access to the series’ final form and contingent on network and creator approval (Stanitzek 48).

Feminist Media Studies, 2012

This Master Thesis deals with the phenomena of "fans" and "fandom" in mainstream television. The work is divided into three parts. In the first part, after an introduction about the research process, and the requirements and difficulties of the investigation of a television series, an overview of the phenomenon of fandom from different perspectives is given. Different approaches, both academic and media studies as well as psychopathological, are offered. Some fundamental aspects of television production techniques and their interrelations with the target group, as well as the distinction between audience and fandom, an essential feature of the work shows, will be discussed. The production of fanfiction, being this one of the main bases of research, is discussed in more detail. In the second part of the work deals in more detail with the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series was chosen due to the broad reception, both in academic circles as well as by the non-academic fans. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in one hand a popular youth series about the daily horror of growing up, disguised as a battle against vampires and other demons. On the other hand, the series drove right from the beginning the attention of the academic world to the product for its use of text and subtext. The series is also known by a high level of interaction with the fan community. This interaction forms part of this research. The third part presents the research process and results to the research question: "How are the fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer represent in the series." The investigation focuses on two aspects. Firstly, the use of fanfiction techniques proofs their close contact with the fan base. Secondly, the series characters, to take over the role of fans in the series: "Trio" and Potential", are closely explored. The investigation is limited to the last two seasons of the series: Season 6 and Season 7 (first airdate 2001-2003). The reasons to reduce the whole 144 episodes of the series to this last 44 episodes are multiple: to begin with it is beyond the scope of a master's thesis, to look into the totally of 144 episodes at 45 minutes each; further the series itself offers a break between the first five seasons and the remaining two due to a channel change and the consequently new targeted groups; further on the study of these 44 episodes allows of a continuity while the threefold totally of the whole series would have been unmanageable; and finally, these seasons offer two new character groups, the aforementioned Trio and Potentials, that correlate perfectly with the usual clichés and associations regarding fans and fandom. An epilogue summarizes the results and answers the research question. Buffy the Vampire Slayer interacts with their fans at a high level, and the fans play a very strong role in the series. This role is outlined twofold, through the use of fanfiction techniques in the scripts, and through the characters that are supposed to represent the fans. The preceding analysis shows that fanfiction techniques are used rigorously and consistently, while the role of the Buffy fans in the series is mirrored by merely cliché characters. A dichotomy between the reception of the series by the academia and by the non-academic community is also addressed. While the academia puts a great emphasis on the subtext and its conscious use by the Buffy writers, the broad Buffy fan community is more attracted by the metaphor of growing up as a battle against a never-ending-demon-horde. Out of the talks carried out during the research, a dichotomous picture of the two fan groups appears: the academia focuses on the subtext, is more sensitive to the historical and literary ideas contained therein, is aware of subtle irony in the series and are mostly middle-aged. Non-academic fans are younger, belonging to the network targeted age group - tweens, 11 to 24 years old – they focus their reading of the product on the representation of their own struggle growing up. An annex with a brief summary of each of the 44 episodes involved in the research facilitates the understanding of the results. A detailed bibliography completes the work.

slayageonline.com

Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Instead of approaching Whedon's texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedon's texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity. Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female.