Joss Whedon: The Biography (50 page)

Ten days later, on November 3, 2004, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry to win a second term in the White House. Joss was disappointed, but his personal campaign against apathy was not dampened. He had reached out to his fans to broaden their activism. In the conference call, he had said that it was time to speak out. “Even if you’re worried that someone else is going to be more articulate than you are. Even if you’re worried that you may not have all the facts,” Joss said. “Nobody has all the facts…. This is a time when … you can stand up and make yourself heard. And I believe this is the one time when we simply have no choice. We must be heard.” It would not be Joss’s last stand against a powerful status quo.

Joss and Kai were now expecting their second child, and Kai was put on bed rest for the last three months of her pregnancy. Normally, she was the one to keep their house in order—an arrangement that had never bothered her before, since Joss was in charge of all the cooking. But now, she was frustrated by her inability to do so, and her new need to put everything in Joss’s hands. “Joss didn’t really know how to load a dishwasher,” she says. “Or really ever notice if things were messy.”

Joss has shared a story that makes shockingly clear the degree to which he can be unaware of the immense clutter around him. “My study was filled with crap…. I would literally have to walk this byzantine, video-game path through all the junk to get to my desk to write,” he said. One weekend while he was away, “Kai and our housekeeper went and cleared out everything completely. I went upstairs, went to my desk and Did. Not. Ever. Notice.” But in mid-2004, with a movie in postproduction, a house to clean, and family to tend to, he needed to step up his game.

Joss’s disappointment over the election gave way to joy when his daughter, Squire, was born on November 7, 2004. Squire was named for his mother’s paternal grandmother’s father, Squire Huguely (1843–1922). Joss noted the irony that Lee’s great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on the side of the South (Huguely was in the Seventh Regiment, Kentucky Cavalry, of the Confederate Army), while his father’s greatgrandfather, John Whedon Steele, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “extraordinary heroism” while fighting for the North. (As a major and aide-de-camp, he “gathered up a force of stragglers and others” to defend against a night attack on the wagon and ammunition train of his corps at Spring Hill, Tennessee, in 1864.) “No wonder [my parents] got divorced,” Joss muses.

The same year that hundreds of fans gathered in Los Angeles to support Joss Whedon’s political fight, approximately four hundred people assembled in Nashville, Tennessee, for another event that attested to Joss’s extraordinary influence beyond the typical bounds of genre entertainment. The event was the first-ever
Slayage
Conference, a gathering of academics discussing
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.

As a child of a teacher, who delved with equal excitement into comic books and Shakespeare, Joss had made research and academic study an essential part of his first two television series. In
Buffy
’s early seasons, the Scooby Gang’s home base was the Sunnydale High School library, where they pored over ancient texts to learn how to defeat the supernatural threat of the week. Unlike a lot of teen shows, the series embraced the idea that old-fashioned book learning was cool. It makes sense, then, that the show’s architect would inspire his fans to delve into the symbolism and deeper meaning of his work, and that Joss and the Whedonverse, like his beloved Shakespeare, would be given their own chapter of academic study.

By 2001, there had been enough scholarly interest in
Buffy
to warrant several books of essays on the series. These collections explored the show, its characters, and its underlying themes through the lenses of such academic disciplines as psychology, philosophy, theology, and sociology. One such collection,
Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, had received so many quality submissions that there was no way that the editors could include all of them. One of the book’s editors, David Lavery, suggested to his coeditor, Rhonda V. Wilcox, that with “a not-soon-to-be-exhausted international critical and scholarly interest” in
Buffy
, they follow in the footsteps of
Whoosh! The Journal of the
International Association of Xenoid Studies
, an online journal that had been established for the series
Xena: Warrior Princess
. In January 2001, Lavery and Wilcox published the first edition of
Slayage: The Online Journal of Buffy Studies
. It included five articles written by PhDs and doctoral students, ranging in topics from “Dissing the Age of Moo: Initiatives, Alternatives, and Rationality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Undead Letters: Searches and Researches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Teen Witches, Wiccans, and ‘Wanna-Blessed-Be’s’: Pop-Culture Magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Wilcox, an English professor and the editor of the journal
Studies in Popular Culture
, had been writing about television long before she started to watch
Buffy
. Initially she brushed off the show as cute, funny, and lightweight entertainment and had no plans to explore it any further. But the longer she watched, the more impressed she was with it. She loved the language of the series (a subject covered by another book, Michael Adams’s
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon
), and she saw Joss as a pioneer who recognized the untapped potential of long-term television narratives. “
Twilight Zone
or
Star Trek
had wonderful symbolism, but you didn’t have the kind of narrative that Whedon did,” Wilcox explains. “He paid attention to the continuity and therefore he was able to grow the characters. That’s something that, as a person who did her dissertation on Charles Dickens, I could really enjoy. When Dickens wrote, he wrote serialized novels, and those were kind of looked down on during the time period that he was creating those. I think that Whedon did some of the same kind of work.”

From 1998 to 2012, various publishers would release no fewer than thirty books of essays exploring different facets of each of Joss’s TV series. No other series or creator has inspired such an intense and expansive body of academic work—not even
Star Trek
, which has been around since 1966. Why such interest? “There are many audience members who were proud of getting the symbolism and invested themselves in the show more because they could see that it had more than one meaning at once,” Wilcox posits. “It was clear that Whedon was counting on having an intelligent audience, which is probably one of the reasons that it worked better on one of the smaller networks, because he never did have that large an audience.”

The world of Whedon studies has yet to win over all academics as a worthy endeavor—which probably says little about Joss and more about the general resistance to accepting television studies (and sometimes even film studies) as important. At this point it may be difficult to convince more traditional academics that Joss’s work belongs in the literary canon, but broadly popular works are often dismissed as unserious by the intellectual class. “You have to wait for about a hundred years or more for it to be realized,” Wilcox argues. “That applied to Dickens, it even applies to Shakespeare, and you would think by now that people would’ve noticed a pattern, right? Harvard would not allow American literature to be taught in the nineteenth century, because, my goodness, that’s beneath us.”

But other academics were eager to discuss Joss’s work, and they began gathering regularly to do just that. The first academic conference on
Buffy
was held in October 2002 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “Blood, Text and Fears: Reading Around
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
” was initially planned to last only one day. However, as Lavery and Wilcox found with
Fighting the Forces
, there were so many submissions that they had to extend it to a full weekend.

“That was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,” Wilcox says, “because I’m standing up in front of hundreds of people giving my
Buffy
paper and every single one of them knew exactly what I was talking about.” She didn’t have to argue about whether studying
Buffy
was a worthwhile pursuit; everyone in attendance was eager to talk
Buffy
well into the night. Two years later, the first
Slayage
Conference was held in Nashville; with its four hundred attendees, it was impressively large for a conference of academics. It would later become the biennial
Slayage
Conference on the Whedonverses.

On April 26, 2005, Universal issued the first trailer for
Serenity
, which was scheduled for release in September of that year. But Joss’s fans would not have to wait until the fall to catch the
Firefly
movie they’d long been waiting for; shortly after the trailer’s release, Universal announced an unprecedented plan to promote the film. On May 5, the studio would start screening a rough cut of the film for fans in three US cities, in hopes of building an early buzz to interest non–
Firefly
fans. Even though the film wasn’t finished, ticket sales were brisk. Over the next two months, screenings were held in thirty-five US cities—often selling out as soon as tickets became available.

Joss knew that the enthusiasm of the Browncoats was an important factor in Universal’s decision to greenlight
Serenity
. During the preview screenings, Joss inserted a message before the film: “All the work the fans have done have helped make this movie. It is, in an unprecedented sense, your movie. Which means if it sucks, it’s your fault…. If this movie matters to you, let somebody know—let everybody know. Make yourselves heard. If you don’t like the movie, this is a time for quiet, for months of silent contemplation.”

Fan interest was certainly high, but some questioned whether the buzz for such a niche sci-fi film could be sustained for five whole months. And if the movie’s core audience had already seen the film at a special screening, how likely were they to return when opening weekend rolled around?

Joss had a different concern: whether the film would make sense to the uninitiated. He’d been so close to the world for so long that he had a difficult time seeing it from the point of view of a complete
Firefly
newbie. Surprisingly, he found a helpful resource in the generally hated
process of film test screenings, in which the studio shows a film to general audiences and uses their feedback to suggest adjustments to the filmmakers. In this case, testing highlighted where Joss had overexplained and underexplained important information, and where he actually did need to adjust things to help uninitiated audiences connect with the film. One key takeaway from the testing was that because
Serenity
’s opening scenes focused on the character of River, audiences didn’t understand that Mal was the central character. Joss went to the set of cinematographer Jack Green’s new movie,
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
, and they shot a new early scene in which River “hands over” the movie to Mal.