Buffy

Read that full interview now. Holy shit.

There are points where he almost, almost convinces you to pity him, and then you read the accounts from women he's dated and it reads like the behaviour of a pure sociopath. Thanks for the fun times Joss, hope you never work again.

Indeed.

Joss always seemed to get ultra defensive about keeping things within the strong vision he himself had for what the story/end product should become, he was never open to anyone altering things or doing anything other than helping him create his story. I remember James Marsters once saying that he thought of a direction for Spike (I believe it was Spike falling in love with Buffy) but that he had to pitch it as a tongue-in-cheek joke to Joss so there was a chance for Joss to take it as his own idea. Joss' own accounts on working with Donald Sutherland, working on the Alien script and again here on working on Justice League also all show that he expected actors to say the lines he had written for them.
In that sense, I can sort of understand where he was coming from regarding his treatment of cast and crew, but it sure doesn't excuse it and it indeed all reveals his character as a narcissistic asshole. And that is even beside his infidelity and treatment of women.
I still love pretty much all of Joss' creations, even with the rotten core of his ego-driven forceful creation towards HIS products, but as much as I think he wanted it, there is still far more to all of those shows and movies than only Joss writing that made them what they are: the cast, the other crew - sadly mistreated as many of them were, they still made for some terrific art.

And Joss Whedon may be a terrible nasty sociopath, but he certainly does have his talents in writing dialogue and general storylines.

I also thought that the vice article was terribly weak. The author doesn't like Joss' writing and somehow seems to wants to prove that it has always been bad writing with bad influence. But a lot of it is missing the point or making subjective arguments which I really cannot agree to. The article also makes a big point out of the fact that Joss' work is dialogue-driven and we're not shown why characters feel or act the way they do. It's dialogue driven, sure, but it is not only dialogue and many examples could be given of strong scenes without dialogue ('Hush', anyone?). Also, a lot of the dialogue is really good and does reveal a lot about the characters. I don't agree with many of the given examples. I thought the X-Men run was fine & the quoted dialogue was actually pretty good - I personally had more of an issue with the plotting of Joss' comics than with the text.
Also, I don't agree at all with the thing about characters being derivative of each other. Kaylee is nothing like Willow. Topher is nothing like Xander.

That last paragraph is so infuriating. What a fucking dick.

He is exactly the toxic narcissist that all those Insta reels warned us about

That article reminds me of various profiles I've read of tech bros in the Silicon Valley, these nerds suddenly given money and power and explicitly coming to the twisted conclusion, well, might as well take advantage of it now and do and be all the terrible things we could never do and be in high school.

I still don't quite follow the Ray Fisher stuff, but even setting aside what may or may not have happened on Justice League (a misbegotten project all around), or Buffy, he sounds like he at the very least grew into a bad person that, for all his purported therapy and pursuit of personal betterness, does not appear to have learned a single lesson.

Did he "grow into" a bad person? Or maybe he was always a gnarled mass of eels, but he hid it well because he liked the attention he got for appearing to be a S.N.A.G.?

I don't see his story as "wide-eyed wunderkind becomes beloved through innovative work, then becomes bad because power and fame corrupted him."

I see it as "He was a deeply troubled and flawed young man, who noticed early on that the best way to get the approval he desperately wanted from attractive and smart young women was to create an elaborate persona of woke feminism. He went to precisely the sort of college where that worked as a dating strategy. As his fame and cachet increased, he realized how much he could get away with, he had no incentive to change."

Maybe he couldn't tell where the persona ended and the "real" Joss began. But in any case, since everyone kept telling him he was brilliant and beloved, there was no reason for him not to indulge his long-held fantasies. In scripts, on various sizes of screen, and - heck - in various dressing rooms. Because why not?

I don't think he came into the industry pure as snow and got corrupted in the process. That lets him off too easily. I think he entered the industry and cannily saw a path to making his 13-year-old's jerkoff scenarios come true. He was fantastically rewarded for doing so (as long as they were couched in an overall storyline of "female empowerment") so there was never a reason for him to evolve.

If in his later career he did stuff like therapy or whatever, mmmkay, but the seed (NPI) was probably there from the beginning.

i think whedon's writing got worse over time tbh (which is not exactly advocated by that v flattening vice piece, but regardless). he totally burrowed into his own tropes. i recall with unfortunate clarity the "we have a black president now" line from the season one finale of dollhouse

also it's impossible not to feel like he made one of the characters in firefly a sex worker just so she could get called a whore constantly

i think whedon's writing got worse over time tbh

yep. I watched The Nevers and while it wasn't awful (I'd compare it to something like the revived Doctor Who), the degree to which it was clearly "joss plays the hits" was pretty embarrassing. If we're narrativizing his career, I think "dude ran out of ideas" is more apt than some of this remote psychopathology

Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc

def always lumped whedon in with this crew in my head so no certainly not solely responsible for this particular strain of horrible writing, god what a baleful and wearisome bunch

I (haven't seen the Nevers but) don't really share the impression that his writing got worse. I think his writing was always overall (IMO) very good, but with occasional flaws from early on.
The impression I get is that after seeing more of his work, some of his tropes became more apparent through frequent use and got very, very tiresome. And none more than the notion that people are simply not allowed to have a happy relationship, because of some kind of philosophy that characters ending up together may be what the viewers want but not what they need. That's why as soon as people finally get together, one gets killed off or worse. I often wondered if that was some kind of pathetic release of Joss' own personal frustrations/inabilities.

It definitely sheds new light on Tara's death.

Like, a really gross new light.

some of his tropes became more apparent through frequent use and got very, very tiresome. And none more than the notion that people are simply not allowed to have a happy relationship, because of some kind of philosophy that characters ending up together may be what the viewers want but not what they need

Okay not to be Cap'n Save-a-Joss, but this was always endemic to television, and increasingly so to movies.

It was everywhere 20 years ago. I would argue that it is even more present today, when franchises and reboots thereof are basically the only thing studios will bankroll.

In the US at least, television series need to be a perpetual motion machine. Storylines mostly cannot ever resolve. Hence, people can't be happy - or can't be happy for long, because that means series death. You need to keep torturing your characters and delay their gratification, and if they get any satisfaction at all it must be ripped away from them at the soonest opportunity.

In the UK, I gather, there is more appetite for series that are permitted to be limited, so it's possible for a UK television character to become happy. But a US television character cannot be allowed to be happy.

It's like, no one wants to watch Romeo and Juliet as a happily married couple, raising adorable kids and eating grapes in the sunshine until they die blissfully at the same moment in one another's arms. Because drama requires conflict. This is an problem that is significantly older than Joseph Motherfucking Whedon.

Joss may not have invented the notion but he took it to the exteme and kind of made it his trademark. Tara gets killed the moment after renewing her relationship with Willow. Fred gets fatally possessed the episode after finally getting together with Wesley. Not to mention what happened wit Cordelia/Angel, Jenny/Giles, Anya/Xander and there are more examples, also Dollhouse Topher/whatshername etc. Buffy allowed for plenty of status quo change but not this. Compare fir example with a show like Grimm (helmed by a Buffy/Angel alum, also featuring Alexis Denisof), where two inportant side characters do hook up early on, develop to marriage and end happily ever after. You can be sure that they wouldn't have, had Joss Whedon been running that show.

Kevin Williamson, Amy Sherman Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, etc

def always lumped whedon in with this crew in my head so no certainly not solely responsible for this particular strain of horrible writing, god what a baleful and wearisome bunch

― Nerd Ragequit (wins), Tuesday, January 18, 2022 11:29 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago)

tbf I meant to include a few writers I'm actually fond of here, but I blanked on a good example (I did mention Succession later). Maybe Milch? One of the things I hated most in that Vice piece was the bit about how it's bad when it "sounds like a writer wrote that," a terrible philistine opinion. Lord save us from a Deadwood with naturalistic dialogue

whedon's shows were def celebrated to some degree for his willingness to off major characters

the moment this stopped being effective for me and revealed itself as a rotten, lazy and emotionally manipulative trope was wash's death in serenity

actually tara's death never landed for me either but they also barely developed her character imo

Agreed on Serenity/Wash. The movie also took out Book, who had a ton of backstory to explore.

Grimm - Monroe/Rosalie were great, plus they had the Nick/Juliette/Adalind triangle for The Drama.

xp to rob otm I didn’t read the vice thing but “nobody talks like this!” never seemed a valuable criticism to me esp in these cases where “this is insufferable” is closer to the mark

bunheads was good, yr insufferable

i will stump for williamson, cody, and specific sherman-palladino projects (first three seasons of gg and, as mentioned, bunheads. mrs. maisel is an awful show from hell imo but i get why people like it)

wins otm

nobody talked like the people in Shakespeare either

or Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, etc.

I don’t actually know know as-p (name is kind of annoying tho) always avoided her stuff for the very reason that I get tired of these things that aren’t comedy (& thus free of the necessity to be funny) but everything must be a quip anyway

Williamson & sorkin are the worst to me but with all of them it’s like there can be value right up to the point where the water torture of the dialogue just becomes shut up shut up shut UP

know-know it’s what it’s called when you know a hyphenated creator

The movie also took out Book, who had a ton of backstory to explore.

book was always more of a theoretically interesting character than an actually interesting character, but the movie still did him very dirty

the moment this stopped being effective for me and revealed itself as a rotten, lazy and emotionally manipulative trope was wash's death in serenity

For me it was earlier, with Fred's possession in Angel. The episode 'A Hole in the World', written and directed by Joss himself, is often regarded as one of the series' best episodes. But I couldn't see what happened to Fred as simply part of the story anymore, it was Joss doing his thing again. With an entire episode to hammer in the fact that this was what was happening and there was nothing to be done about it.
I like Illyria and the subsequent episodes a lot, but dislike 'A Hole in the World' & Fred's death for more than merely storyline reasons. Also because it is the first thing to happen right after her one moment of relationship bliss with Wesley.

To be fair, the Serenity movie did give us the one Whedonverse relationship to make it to the end (Kaylee/Simon). Hollywood pressure?

he expected actors to say the lines he had written for them

isn't this generally how it works?

i know there are directors who believe in improvisation and i imagine most actors enjoy having that extra input/freedom but i kind of thought that was fairly rare. particularly if the person who wrote the script is also the director

Depends on the kind of film/show, comedy that involves the actors riffing off each other obviously has a lot more room for off-the-cuff improv, sometimes to the detriment (e.g. Ghostbusters 2016)

If it's a gazillion dollar superhero movie with a troubled production, and things are already tense and difficult, you could see it causing some problems if some of the cast suddenly decide to go off-script.

xp

I got the impression that at a certain point Whedon lost interest in running a cohesive show or writing solid episodes that progressed the narrative and became more focused on showing that he could do anything he wanted to. Hence, he can write a Lynchian dream episode, or an existentialist drama, or a musical, or in this case, an operatic tragedy, and if the effect on the audience seems gross and manipulative well that’s too bad because he’s going to write his operatic tragedy.

don't forget the puppet episode of Angel

pic.twitter.com/vNBgoRPVOW

— charisma carpenter (@AllCharisma) January 18, 2022

xpost puppet episode was by Ben Edlund, bit of an undervalued contributor to the latter seasons of Angel (and Firefly)

<3 charisma carpenter forever

the Vulture profile was so so satisfying to read...novelistic!

and creator of the tick!!!

xxp

i will stump for williamson, cody, and specific sherman-palladino projects

me too. I know people hated Juno and in fact I can barely remember it, but Cody wrote the very very good Young Adult and Tully, which more than makes up for any other crimes. Also I like GG and Bunheads and yes, Maisel. Fuck you all!

jennifer's body is one of my favorite movies of all time

oh yeah that's good too, forgot about that one. I'd say Diablo Cody is good more often than not.

I do want to see Jennifer’s Body, Juno is horribly written but maybe that one is explicitly going for the grating vibe of the very bad screenwriters then in vogue such as sorkin and williamson

xxpost yeah i agree horeshoe, i thought it was v well written & constructed

Even Kevin Williamson's Dawson's Creek house style is, in retrospect, much less annoying than Whedonism.

lol i somehow didn't know williamson co-developed the vampire diaries, guy cornered the teen trash tv market over two separate decades

i didnt know that either

I love how when people talk about this dork, its like "the all-singing episode!" "the puppet episode!"

Yeah sounds great, sign me up for this shit

Scrubs was pulling that shit all the time too, yo

Yeah, I'm not out here trying to separate the art from the artist on whoever made Scrubs

the guy who made scrubs is bill lawrence who also makes ted lasso

Joss Whedon might be an abusive narcissist but at least he didn't foist Zach Braff upon the world?

it all just sucks

i was a huge fan of every whedon show, esp buffy - for a while i even lurked on the messageboard they reference in the vulture piece

now it’s like i can’t even rewatch an old episode of buffy without thinking of him & all of his bullshit. i dont always struggle separating art from artist but so much of him & his voice is in these shows that it’s almost impossible to even revisit them anymore

and to be clear i’m not saying this in an “oh poor me” way - it’s more just, i’m fucking mad that he has ruined my enjoyment of these shows that i genuinely loved. and that i never knew he was actively ruining them the whole time

I had a class with the professor they mention in the article who started Whedon Studies. He wrote a book about Bukowski!