Marvel Studios brass needed somebody smart to keep superhero team-up The Avengers from turning into a muddled mess. They rolled the dice on Joss Whedon.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
You know you’ve offended Joss Whedon when he stops talking in Whedonisms. Usually the writer-director is funny, wry, and acutely self-awareâ€"just like the characters he creates for his shows and movies, from the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the new horror flick The Cabin in the Woods. He’ll order a chardonnay at lunch and slouch sideways in a booth, riffing on geek tropes from Star Trek to Twilight Zone.
But suggest that his TV show Dollhouse was really just about a pretty girl in a dominatrix outfit getting beaten up every week and Whedon transfigures into Buffy’s erudite, ever-so-slightly supercilious mentor, Gilesâ€"if you could imagine Giles in a hoodie. The words get longer, the references more arcane. He sits up and leans over his plate of scallops, elbows on the table. The professor has arrived, and class is in session.
Dollhouse aired for 25 episodes on Fox in 2009 and 2010. It was Whedon’s fourth show, and it had all the elements that made Buffy so greatâ€"ass-kicking ingenue, crackling dialog, plenty of sci-fi weirdness, and enough subtext to choke a lit-theory major. It was also, as Whedon himself admits, potentially the most offensive television program of all time. The storyâ€"a secret organization mind-wipes attractive people, reprograms them, and pimps them out to clientsâ€"was like an icky Fantasy Island with gunfights and psychosis. Even diehards who’d stuck with Whedon since Buffy didn’t get it. “Bless their hearts, the fans were all going, ‘It’s Joss. We trust him. Maybe we’re missing how it’s good,’†Whedon says. “It was very sweet.â€
Still, he’s sure the audience was in some part wrong about Dollhouse. Just a few nights before this lunchtime exegesis, he happened to see a clip from the show and was struck anew by it. Wait a minute, he thought, this show is meaningful. It wasn’t just a girl getting beaten upâ€"it was what Whedon calls “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever madeâ€"somebody building themselves from nothing.†He wanted to do a show that would deconstruct identity and relationships and socialization … and celebrate human perversion.
Whedon’s enthusiasm for Dollhouse‘s complex narrative and subtext is so infectious that it’s easy to forget the show flopped. Completely. But none of the movies and TV shows he’s created have been mainstream hits. Not Buffy. Not the sci-fi Western Firefly. Not Serenity, the movie based on it. The most successful, arguably, have been the ones over which Whedon had the most control, like Buffy or the independently produced and digitally distributed Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. He thrives on independence, and studio brass who want him to rein in his darker impulses just get in the way.
Yet just up the LA street from the restaurant we’re in is Marvel Studios, where Whedon is directing The Avengers, this summer’s mega-ultra-awesome crossover superhero blockbuster. It is not a project that welcomes independence. Produced by Marvel, distributed by Marvel’s owner, Disney, and with a story line all but predetermined by Marvel, it is perhaps the absolute Bizarro-world opposite of independence. The Avengers unites the narratives of five interconnected movies from the past few years and is the ignition point for a decade of potential sequels and new superhero pictures. With the turbines of the Disney-Marvel machine spinning up, why would the company let this commercially unproven directorâ€"no matter how smart he isâ€"helm the ship?
Then again, tent-pole blockbusters are a pain in the ass to oversee. Whedon has a fan base that rivals Star Trek’s in its ferocity, and he’s doing just fine producing smaller movies. So maybe the bigger question is, why would this cult-favorite writer-director ever put up with The Avengers?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer began as a failure. Whedon, then a young writer toiling in the sitcom fields, wrote it as a movie script that pivoted on a central twist: A vicious monster follows a beautiful teenage girl into a dark alley, and only the girl walks back out. Whedon wanted to make the ingenue into an action hero, to literally empower a young woman. But the 1992 film, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, turned into a slapstick farce. It’s not without charm, but big-screen Buffy seems petulant, and the jeopardy feels false. Too much flounce, not enough kickboxing.
Whedon went on to success as a screenwriter and script doctor, working on Toy Story and Alien: Resurrection and doing uncredited work like a rewrite of Speed. But a few years later TV producers got interested in redoing Buffy as a half-hour kids’ show, the kind of thing that could run after Power Rangers. Whedon got on board. He even remembers the first gag he came up with for the show: A group of vampires would be waiting to attack Buffy, and one of them would say, “Why don’t we all attack her at once?†A second vamp would respond, “Tradition. It’s an honor thing.†That narrative self-awareness, the promise to zig when most action shows predictably zag, was typicalâ€"â€Whedonesque,†even. Seeing Whedon’s enthusiasm and the richness of his ideas, the newly formed WB network bought the concept as an hour-long drama and put Whedon in charge.
The series, which ran from 1997 to 2003, creates a metaphorical universe that renders the awfulness of adolescence through the conventions of horror and sci-fi. High school is hellâ€"literally. Be ignored by your peers and turn invisible. Sneak out to a frat party and get molested by a giant white snake demon in the basement. Lose your virginity and your boyfriend becomes an evil monster. Sometimes you can communicate only through music; sometimes (because of magic) you can’t communicate at all.
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